Wind Facing Lightning
by Tiamat's Child
Summary: Gaz really needs more than she’s getting


Title: Wind Facing Lightning  
Author: Tiamat's Child   
Fandom: Invader Zim  
Pairing: None! 'Tis gen.  
Rating: PG  
Summary: Gaz really needs more than she's getting  
Disclaimer: Hee. The kiddo isn't mine, and neither are the folk who surround her.  
Author's Notes: Written for the Contrelamontre/Ame Soeur complementary colors challenge. Time limit of 90 minutes, written in 87 minutes.

Wind Facing Lightning

Gaz likes storms. There's something about them that seems ready to burst out of any boundaries anything places on them. The only reason, Gaz feels, that storms don't rampage across the entire world, immortal and unstoppable, is that they don't feel like it.

She'd like to be that way, but she's well aware she isn't. Gaz really is bound by things, family and walls and school and even the things that bring her release. Things like her games. She knows it's a problem that she has so much trouble caring about anything that isn't on the screen of her Gameslave. But she can't bring herself to care about that either, except to hate that it's needful 

Tonight there's a storm, and Gaz has gone out to sit in the driveway. She's curled up small, her knees drawn up to her small chest and her arms wrapped neatly around her ankles. She isn't rejoicing in the storm, not tonight. She's afraid, and lonely, and exhausted with the effort of holding herself in the place between caring and not caring. All she wants is take in a little of the storm, and let it draw her out of herself, removing memory and fear and letting her become a part of the wind and cloud and rain.

When she was little, and things were still all all right, Dib used to tell her stories that were about the two of them but pretended that they weren't. One of those was about the lightning and the wind, and how they played all the time together, up far away from where humans could go. And sometimes the wind would trip, and fall, and the lightning would strike to warn everyone away from where the wind fell, so the wind could get back up again and would stay safe. And Gaz knows that he told that story so she wouldn't worry about anything that might go wrong.

But things do go wrong, and no one can fix them, and who knows how it happened but Gaz is all alone. Dib doesn't see anything but his aliens and bogeymen anymore, and even when he speaks to her it's just to rant about that stupid Zim. Gaz rather hates Zim. At least things were kind-of-semi-maybe-pretend okay before he came. At least Dib didn't come home covered in cuts and bruises and then lock himself in his room for hours. 

Gaz is so angry with Dib. He's forgotten about a lot of things. She doesn't want to speak of why things changed, but she knows that they have and that it wasn't always like this. Dib's forgetting that. He can't remember that the two of them need each other. How he could forget that they balance each other, bringing things to neutrality by their fighting and laughing (there used to be laughing. Gaz used to laugh. She doesn't really anymore) and just being, is beyond Gaz, but then, she never did understand her brother. 

They used to blend, her black to his white, fading into grey, which is a color that's almost stable. But now they don't, and Gaz is having trouble staying somewhere that's safe. Without Dib she has to work very hard not to fall so far into black that no one can see her at all anymore.

So she's angry. She can't be all all right on her own, and it's not safe to be angry at her father because he works so hard and is so safe and if she's angry at him then nothing is safe and there's nothing sacred and nothing will ever be anything like alright again. So she's angry at Dib. It works. He doesn't seem to care that she's angry, or why, and that makes her angrier, but it's still easier than explaining.

Dib is out tonight, playing at being black ops in the rain. He isn't, of course, and he couldn't be, because Dib is really not a ruthless person no matter what else he may be. No, all of that went to his sister. If Dib had any real clue he wouldn't want what he thinks he does. Gaz does have a clue. And she knows that if she had a gun, and someone begging mercy at her feet, and they were dangerous, she'd give them mercy. That's what they used to call it. Mercy. The cut of grace, as the French would say. 

Maybe it's a character flaw. She doesn't know.

She does know that she needs Dib, and his ethics, and it makes her furious that he's gone off and found someone else to play with and obsess over when _she_ needs him. It's not right. Family isn't supposed to leave you all alone this way. And no matter how strange and embarrassing her brother is she needs him and he's not supposed to pretend she doesn't and go save the world when it doesn't need saving. And it doesn't need saving because Zim is one of those people who could manage to kill a live hydrogen bomb while trying to get it to detonate. He's terminally unlucky. Couldn't invade a flea.

But her family needs saving and she can't do it because she can't even find a way of living without something to take her outside of herself. And her father can't do it, because he's lost in maze on maze of dreams and discoveries and test tubes. That leaves her brother. She knows that he could do it, if he'd only look and see he needs to, because he's her brother, and he can do anything. Brothers can always do anything. They can fix anything. They can make anyone feel as if they're not abandoned.

Still, tonight she's alone, and can see no happy endings. That's all right, really. Gaz has never been good at seeing happy endings, even in her games. When she plays them she's so certain that all the characters in them will fall and fail and there will be nothing happy at the end. This despite the fact that she's very good at playing games. 

She's not so good at life.

So she curls up, and lets the feel of tiny bits of grit grinding into her bare legs be a ground, and falls up into the storm. No lightning has come to protect her, but she's the wind, and she always finds a way to get up. And the storm takes her, for a time.


End file.
